Shadows & Tall Trees (23 page)

“They
should be joining
me
. It wasn’t the bus they were supposed to be on. I’ve seen it twice now. Couldn’t get their attention. We had seats booked on the Stagecoach run to Manchester.”

It no longer felt like any consolation, the three of them safely out of Guards Wood. Karl slipped out into the street. Voices and traffic sounded like they were from radios turned down low. If he was slumped in a chair outside Journeys End, replete with apple pie, when was he going to stop haunting this washed-out Connerstone and wake up?

Later, he walked between darker shadings of slate and stone. Hints of evening in touches of chill air from side roads. Cloud like the thick-ribbed drab sand of a seabed. In an alleyway between shops he got out his phone. The same gratingly breezy recording of Malcolm’s voice. Gareth’s repetitive coughing ringtone was like something dying.

He booked into the Beaumont Hotel. That evening in the bar he sat at a table and drank mineral water. Coming down from alcohol would exacerbate the ache of abandonment that rippled wider than the sundering from his friends.

A large shaggy dog, an unidentifiable cross-breed, wandered, accepting crisps and peanuts before retiring behind the counter. A sudden odour of cider or raw apple broke into Karl’s fascination with the flames in the wood burner. A waft of rotten eggs had him standing. Deep snorts and porcine squeals under the counter. A sinuous movement of a shiny reddish brown embedded itself into a group of voluble young women. Whispering laughter was like a vapour around their harder chuckles. It dispersed as he stood before the group; none of them was the girl from Journeys End. It took a moment for them to notice him staring. He returned to his seat and gave it up soon after. Nobody else appeared to notice the sulphurous smell which the dry heat of the wood-burner intensified until it was more than he could stand.

The streets were as empty as the paths and glades of Guards Wood, and as silent—until he heard the rattle of the engine. It drew him through the village and had faded to nothing by the time he was in sight of the car park, a crossword puzzle layout demarcated by wilting flowers in stone troughs, low walls and head-high shrubs.

The bus was in a corner. Approaching warily he saw that the grey wasn’t paint, but the absence of it. He was reminded of favourite toy cars, taken from the toy box so often they began to lose their lead paint and reveal the matte metal beneath. Deep scratches in the bodywork. Rust wounds. Lifting his gaze he saw threads of bright orange where cracks in the glass caught the sodium light.

A double shock seeing the seated figures in the dark interior, hearing the engine cough suddenly like a diseased thing. He staggered back as, moaning through its length, the bus moved off. Karl followed until it was heading through the exit and withdrawing like a bloodless tongue into the stone jaws of the village.

Visible through the rear window, four heads on the back row, five if that right-hand corner seat had been filled. Later maybe, the passengers’ dispersal to hotels and bed-and-breakfasts—though their continued presence was making them seem as integral to the functioning of the bus as the sick engine.

The crowd awoke him. A vast crowd, an ocean of voices dragooned by an overwhelming voice soaring and swooping above them. It couldn’t be the country fair again, not at this late hour, and in any case the sounds weren’t entering via the leaded panes of the window.

He got out of bed, opened his door a few inches. Nothing audible from downstairs, other than a sound that soon he identified as a lazy flap of turned pages.

In the soft illumination of night-lights he went down the stairs. The multitudes, gone now, could have emanated from a TV or radio.

The visitors’ book was on a walnut occasional table. Cold air laid a page finally to rest and stiffened Karl’s limbs.

On facing pages, names. The latest entry had Gareth’s precise tiny signature. The preceding name was Malcolm’s.

Were they in this hotel? A coincidence—or they had discovered he was staying here. They must have booked in late—any earlier he would have seen them in the bar, unless they’d chosen to hide in their rooms. Speculating on how their reunion with him might proceed, he drew a blank, couldn’t in fact envisage any kind of reunion. Again no comment by Gareth’s neat inscription. Malcolm had written “Heavenly enclave” rather than come up with something new for the Beaumont. Similarly, there was a single space waiting to be filled at the bottom of the right-hand page. The ink was the same reddish brown as in the book at Journeys End. There was even an identical make of pen, fawn, shiny, like a long slender bone of a bird.

Karl flipped over the book; the front cover had a reddish brown encrustation like the scab over a healing wound. He pressed his splayed fingers into it, wanted to press it out of existence. He stepped away from it. “Heavenly enclave” flattered Journeys End, the visitors’ book for which was before him now. In the morning, oh yes, in the morning, he’d slam the book down onto the reception desk and demand an explanation and—

A footfall at the end of the passageway to the staff quarters, a shadow poised in the doorway. Karl said, “What’s this doing here?”

Placing a finger on the last two names in the visitors’ book, the paper felt smoother. He looked down—it was cleaner, newer—and he didn’t recognize the names. There was a column for dates in the left-hand margin. There was a blue biro chained to a blotting pad.

The manager said nothing; he wasn’t even present.

After breakfast, a crackling like fire after Karl had keyed in his friends’ mobile phone numbers. Later that morning his phone battery was dead, and his charger was in his flat in Manchester. He could be there himself by evening if he caught today’s Stagecoach run.

At midday he left the hotel and drank in a coffee shop and watched pedestrians and vehicles. He browsed unthinkingly in souvenir shops and outdoor clothing emporia. He was in dread and hope of seeing the grey bus. If, bizarrely, Malcolm and Gareth were still onboard he’d find some way to get on. He’d confront them, shake them out of whatever stupor held them. He wouldn’t be taking that empty back seat, he’d be ensuring two more would be vacant.

Mid-afternoon he sat on the churchyard wall. Unshaven and in the clothes he had climbed mountains and slept in, he was as noteworthy as a lamppost to the apathetic crowds on the path.

A sustained snort from the open back doors of a butcher’s van shocked him. A hiss of airbrakes had him covering both ears and retreating into the church. His gaze skittered over the visitors’ book in the porch and he entered the nave where he sat on the back pew.

In a side chapel as dark as the bole in a tree, a bank of candles in transparent votive holders cast a lurid red light, rendering the priest’s face demonic.

Cries from the street, masses of them. An amplified voice barged and blundered. Karl shook his head; a country fair can’t have instantly manifested itself in the graveyard. He didn’t believe in it even when the priest said, “Now that’s a glorious din.” His eyes retained a faint redness when he turned to face Karl. “Hell is other people, it’s been said. That’s true enough.” A toothless smile, if it was a smile. “You can’t escape it.”

Filling the long slits of the side pockets in his soutane, his hands must have been enormous. He was bringing the darkness of the chapel out with him. Karl didn’t want to hear whatever else the man intended to say and left.

Outside he listened. Only village sounds, muted as if heard through thick canvas. The fair must have been a recorded event, blasted out of the open window of a vehicle going by.

The graffiti-decorated porta-cabin was indicative of how the police viewed the general run of tourists’ issues in the village. What would they make of this one? Inside there was a tiny TV screen over the desk: Karl couldn’t tell from the tiny busy figures if he was seeing the streets outside or the exterior of some obscure daytime drama. It held the apple-chinned officer’s attention until Karl repeated himself in a raised voice, and even then he looked to the window first as if Karl had called from outside.

Karl omitted details that would demolish his chance of a fair hearing. The officer dragged his pen across the incident book opened out on the counter. He began asking questions; where was Karl from, did he have a job, did he live alone? “I don’t think I can help you here. Looks like your . . . 
friends
are alive and well. Not sure you’re in good shape though. You look like death warmed-up. Take my advice and take yourself back home—wherever that is.” A place the officer appeared to have little faith in.

The village was like floating debris on a sluggish stream. Shutters came down on the front window of the greengrocer’s. Battered suitcases were being loaded into the open wound in the side of a coach.

In the Yewdale Arms Karl sat at a table close to the bar, drank scotch and placed his ticket on the table before him. Seat thirty-nine. Would the company accept it for today’s service? At home, at work, he would let the mystery resolve itself.

The priest entered and Karl felt a curdling sensation in his stomach, a taste of apple and bad eggs. Sitting opposite him, the priest crossed his black-trousered legs, entwining them down to his coal-black shoes. He nodded at the coach ticket. “Thirty-nine—you’re the last. They aren’t going anywhere without you. You must accept the inevitable.”

“They?” Karl’s back prickled with cold, his front baked as if the priest exuded heat.

“‘They’ are a delightful family—but homesick.” Dreamy reminiscence on the priest’s face. “They’ve been stuck here for ages and can’t return until they’ve met their quota of names—thirty-nine to be exact. Thirty-nine is a number replete with diabolical significance.” He snickered. “Sadly for them, thirty-eight isn’t.”

“Names?” Karl pocketed the ticket. If the coach left at 4:50pm, same as yesterday, he’d be away from this lunacy.

“Yes, obviously you haven’t signed the book. They aren’t happy about that. That’s the payment they required for that sumptuous repast.”

Karl wanted to swing with his fist at the delta of throbbing red veins in the priest’s temple. In the soutane’s side pockets, an outline of abnormally long fingers. The man’s stomach rumbled like magma. A taste of apples and foul eggs crumpled Karl’s face.

“Go to Hell,” Karl said. His frown felt half way down his face.

The priest’s sigh seemed to issue not just from his crooked mouth. “I wish.” On one side his gleaming forehead drooped like wax to his cheek as airbrakes screamed. Karl got up, quivering.

In the tall window, just under the curtain rail and in the plain glass over the lower half of frosting, a band of faces blurred, stilled.

Malcolm’s and Gareth’s gazes passed through Karl as unheeding of him as subatomic particles.

Bubbling pitch behind him. He turned to see the opening to the Gents door narrowing under the bent arm of the self-closing device. A hot, layered and meaty stink made him gag. He rushed out, swallowed air in the street, felt nauseous. No bus in sight but it didn’t matter, as he knew Gareth and Malcolm were no longer aboard.

There was a bottleneck of tourists at the entrance to a side road. Motionless forms beyond a ferment of people entering and exiting some establishment a little way down with a “Closing Down Sale” sandwich board notice outside. He crossed over, keeping his gaze steady. Two people; Gareth and Malcolm, he firmly believed until the sinuous slenderness of one couldn’t possibly be Gareth nor the obesity of the other Malcolm.

Though the pair had gone by the time he’d made his way through the crowd, Karl sensed they’d found a better spot from which to observe him.

On the corner, the butcher’s shop; in its window a pig’s head with tiny eyes stared glassily at him from a bed of lettuce leaves and apple halves. Then his attention was drawn to a narrow maroon pennant, rippling off its pole and tumbling down the other side of the petrol garage’s shallow pitched roof.

At the terminal shortly before 4:50 the driver told him the coach was full and that his ticket was for yesterday. The coach slid away. An official said there were no more services to anywhere before tomorrow. Karl returned to the Beaumont and booked another night. He tried not to be upset by anything other than what this was costing him financially.